I first learned about OBDII back in 2003. It’s the on board diagnostics system in your car that lets you get all kinds of live data while your car is running. I bought all the electronics to make my own reader and then… nothing. Eventually in 2008 I realized that I was never going to build it and bought a ScanGauge. I happily used that little device in my Subaru and later in my F150. It worked flawlessly, but now it’s sitting in the garage because I got an upgrade.
For my birthday, Tyla and Elijah gave me an Automatic. It’s an OBDII reader with a built in GPS and 3g modem. While you drive, it automatically records a bunch of you car data along with your current position and it uploads it all to their cloud service. You can also connect to the device via Bluetooth to get live data displayed on your phone. Setup was a breeze and so far it has worked flawlessly.
I think the target audience for the device is someone who drives for business and needs an easy way to track their business trips. You can easily flag a drive and it gets added to a report. Personally I’m more interested in downloading my data and doing my own analysis on it. There are some nifty apps that work right out of the box as well. For example, one app shows you your min, max and average commute times to and from work. Another builds a heat map of the places you have visited. Another one draws one of those maps where every county that you have visited is colored in.
Do I need this? Nope! But I love having gadgets that collect data about random stuff in my life so this fits right in. Time to crack open their API and see how to pull my data out of their cloud.
We still have cable in our house, but it’s the most basic package and it only costs us $10/month. We’d probably ditch it entirely except that we can’t get good over the air reception in our location. To help figure out where to watch things, a bunch of great websites have popped up. (All of these tips have come form the excellent Cordkillers podcast.)
JustWatch.us – Create a list of the TV shows and movies that you want to watch, tell it what streaming services you subscribe to, and then the website will tell you which shows you can watch on those services. I’ve gotten in the habit of putting movies on my list and then eventually when they make it to the streaming services, I can watch them from the comfort of my own home.
WhereCanIWatchMy.team – This site only works for NFL and College Football right now, but it’s still a great idea. You tell it which teams you want to follow and it tells you which streaming service you should subscribe to so you can watch the most games.
Suppose.tv – What’s the cheapest way to watch all your favorite channels? This site will help you figure out. But here’s a tip: don’t select channels that you would be willing to subscribe to separately (like HBO). That will give you better search results.
Our summer vacations were dedicated to family this year. At the end of July, we went to a family reunion in Fort Peck, MT and then a couple weeks ago we flew out to Indiana. We had originally planned to go earlier in the year, but we ended up moving the trip as it was the same week that Tyla’s mom passed away. Thankfully Southwest has an incredible flight change policy!
We were in Indiana for 8 nights, and, as usual, we had a great time. It was so relaxing to just hang out with very few responsibilities. Luke, Rachel and David came for the weekend so that added some extra fun. Grandpa and Lynnette came down for the day too so Grandpa and I could celebrate our birthday together. We didn’t do anything huge but we had a bunch of good day trips including a botanical center, lots of tractor rides, putt putt golf, go karts, the Studebaker Museum and a water ski show.
Thanks again to Dad and Mom for hosting us and spending so much time playing with Elijah!
The Seahawks Packers game is always a favorite of mine since we have so many friends who are Packer fans. While we had fun watching with a good group of people, the game felt like kind of a dud. Neither team could really get anything going but the Packers pulled out the win. I’ll keep waiting for the first Seahawks touchdown. Maybe next week.
The first week in our league was underwhelming. There were a lot of low scores and everyone under-performed according the Yahoo prediction (which means nothing but still…) Andy, Luke, Logan and I have started down the path toward an undefeated season. Trying to remember what happened last year? Here were the final standings:
1. Logan
2. Austin
3. Andy
4. Ben
5. Tim
6. Jim
7. Dad
8. Luke
For the record book, I’ll leave last season’s stats up for a week or two.
This Week
Last Season
All-Time
Highest Team Score
Ben had 117.17
Logan had 170.69 (Week 5)
Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score
Dad had 61.50
Was: Jim had 77.82 (Week 2)
Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout
Luke beat Dad by 51.52
Logan beat Tim by 79.46 (Week 5)
Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win
Andy beat Austin by 15.9
Tim beat Dad by 0.45 (Week 4)
Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player
Kareem Hunt had 43.10 on Logan’s bench
Ben Roethlisberger had 43.90 for Andy (Week 4)
Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak
Andy, Luke, Logan and Ben have 1 game winning streaks
Tim had a 4 game winning streak (Week 4)
Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak
Austin, Tim, Dad and Jim have 1 game losing streaks
It’s wildfire season around here and this has been the Summer of Smoke. Winds have been blowing slightly differently and we’ve had a lot of VERY smoky days with low visibility and terrible air quality. One day the smoke was so thick that it blocked out the sun completely and it was raining ash.
There are a lot of big fires in the area, but the one I’ve been following is the Norse Peak fire. You can read all the details on the inciweb page or in various news articles, but the basic info is that 13 separate fires were ignited by lightning on August 10 and 11. Those quickly combined and threatened, among other things, the Crystal Mountain ski area. They were forced to evacuate everyone and the smoke was so thick that they couldn’t bring in helicopters for water drops. Even firefighters were evacuated at one point because they were in danger of having their exit route cut off by the fire. At the worst point, fire was visible coming down the ridge just north of the base area.
Thanks to incredibly long hours by various fire departments, no structural damage has occurred to the resort yet. It sounds like they are getting the fire under control now. We had a small amount of rain and winds have shifted so that the smoke is clearing out. It does sound like they will be closed for the remaining couple weeks of the summer season. Follow their Facebook page for updates.
My parents jokingly refer to their house as “Fort Wilderness”. I didn’t appreciate it growing up as much as I do now. When I made those two signs for Don and Dean, I also made one for my parents and delivered it on our recent trip. These are fun to make but I’m more excited to do them after I get a CNC. That will remove a lot of the stress of making them.
We have a fairly big closet at the top of our stairs that holds a bunch of stuff that doesn’t otherwise have a home: sleeping bags, board games, wrapping paper, vacuum cleaner, folding chairs, etc. It’s a mess. That’s not terrible except that we have to leave the door open because it is also the closet where I had the electrician run all my network jacks. That closet has a whole bunch of networking gear and two computers that are on 24/7. It gets way too hot if the door is closed. Some day I might build a ventilation system in there, but regardless of whether I do that, I knew I needed to build some storage that was better than our old wire frame shelves.To kick things off, I cleaned out the closet, took down the wire shelves and then patched all the old screw holes from those shelves. I even sprayed on some new wall texture to hide the patches. I had a leftover half gallon of the same brown color that is used in many other places in our house and it was the perfect amount to paint the closet.
The real improvement will come from some new storage cabinets, but first I needed a solution for the mess of computer wires. It had to just sit on the floor while I was painting and I needed it out of the way for the cabinet project. So the first build in this project was a very simple set of shelves to hold the computers, routers, battery backups and other miscellaneous gear. The shelves were a quick one day build (with Elijah helping) out of a sheet of 3/4″ plywood, some poplar to hide the exposed plywood edges on the front, and a bunch of pocket screws. It’s not fancy, but the bulk of this will be hidden by the new closets along the same side wall anyway. And for me, this is glorious. It’s going to be so much easier to diagnose problems and I finally have all of the network jacks in our entire house connected at the same time. Nerdvana.
We started off the year having very little idea of what our garden would actually end up growing. Turns out, it worked pretty well! The box by the street has some strawberries and two zucchini plants. We did get some strawberries but that will ramp up quite a bit over the next two years as the plants mature. The zucchini have been producing like crazy. I think we might just do one next year.
The box closer to the house has a few more strawberry plants and six sun gold tomato plants. Having six of the same plant is overkill. I started a few different varieties in the house, took careful notes about which seeds were which, and then ignored all the notes when I picked the six healthiest plants to move outside. Oops.
Here are some changes that we’ll consider for next year:
Two zucchini plants is a lot. Maybe do one zucchini and one rhubarb?
I think it makes sense to put all the strawberries in one box. They are going to overrun whatever container they are in.
The drip tubing worked great, but maybe instead of carefully placing each emitter, I could use the small area sprayers.
Don’t try to start plants. It sounds like a great idea, but I did a terrible job guessing when we’d be ready to move plants outside. Warm weather came much later than expected and it was tricky to manage the big plants inside the house.
Tyla wanted to plant flowers but I think we waited too long for the seeds to take hold (too hot and too much shade from bigger plants.)
It all started at the church Christmas party in December. Logan was talking to DaveK about his incredible weight loss and he mentioned that getting up to Camp Muir was his “man mission.” Dave said, “Great! Let’s do it!” That’s the point where I walked up and said, “I’m in. What are we doing?” “Camp Muir!”
Fast forward to August and I was waking up at 4am to meet Logan, Dave, TimK, and Pastor for the drive down to Paradise. We arrived in the parking lot at 7:45 and we were on the trail by 8:15.
Skyline Trail up to Pebble Creek is one of the most popular hikes from Paradise. It’s about 1800 feet of elevation gain (from 5400 feet at Paradise up to 7200 feet) in around 2 miles. We maybe stopped once but we were up to Pebble Creek very quickly. We took a break there to refuel, change our clothing a bit and get ready for the snowfield.
From Pebble Creek, the route goes straight up the Muir Snowfield. It’s about 2.2 miles and 2800 feet up to Camp Muir from Pebble Creek. And it’s on snow. And the snow is slushy from the sun. And oh yeah, you’re going up over 10,000 feet so you rapidly start to notice the decreased lack of oxygen.
At this point we spread out a bit, set our own paces and got in the zone. It’s hours of staring at your feet, concentrating on your breathing, and taking tiny little steps up the mountain. I don’t know what the “hardest day hike” in the area is, but this has to be a solid contender. In addition to the physical challenge, the immense scale is psychologically frustrating. You put your head down, slog away for 20 minutes, look up and realize that your goal doesn’t look any closer than it did before.
But we all made it! Logan was first up with a total time (from Paradise) of 3:26. He probably could have shaved off another 10 or 15 minutes but he stopped to wait for us at one point on the snowfield. Pastor and I clocked in right at 3:30 and Dave and Tim came in at the 3:45 mark. My previous time was 4:10 so I was very happy to beat that.We hung around at the camp for about an hour enjoying the incredibly clear views. Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and Mt. St. Helens were clearly visible. The temps were perfect and there wasn’t a lot of wind. I couldn’t have dreamed up better weather.
Eventually we made our way back down the mountain. We all brought something to slide on. Most of us brought trash bags but Dave had snowpants (the smart choice) and Pastor had a tarp. Glissading down was fun for a while, but it was pretty painful. The chutes were all too narrow and the icy sidewalls would hammer our thighs. We got pretty soaked in the process too. But it sure beat the effort it took to go UP! The video below is not representative of most of the glissading. This one was right near the bottom so it was well-used and dug out by people who just came up to see the snow.
After another stop at Pebble Creek to switch into some drier clothes, we hoofed it down to Paradise dodging the enormous hordes of people who had made it to Paradise and were exploring the trails.
I’m really happy with how good my muscles felt after the hike. I had very little soreness aside from the bruising caused by the glissading. The worst part was that I think I got some altitude sickness this time. Thankfully it didn’t hit me until we were resting up at Muir. I had a bad headache and started feeling nauseated and lightheaded. The latter two went away as we descended bu the headache stuck with me well into the night.
In my blog post on the last hike, I had some good notes that were helpful for planning this trip, so here are a few more notes in case I do it again:
I used about 3-3.5 liters of water. Last time I used 5. I think 4 would be a safe amount. I used two Camelbaks and had a half gatorade, half water mixture in one. I would do that again.
I threw some summer sausage, cheese and crackers into a cooler with extra gatorade and water. That was a huge hit when we got back to the truck.
Getting on the trail around 8 felt like good timing. There were plenty of people who left ahead of us, but it was not too crowded. On a weekday you could probably leave a little later, but on a weekend, stick with 8 or earlier.
I took a bandanna with me and suck it in the back of my hat. It did a great job keeping the sun off my neck.
Thanks to Logan for suggesting this and to all the guys for banding together to make this a reality. It was awesome to see Logan beating us all up the mountain. Two years ago I don’t think anybody would have believed he could get in such good shape in such a short amount of time. Kudos to you Logan!
Destin Sandlin has one of the best YouTube channels in existence: Smarter Every Day. I don’t know how he keeps upping his game, but he has managed to do it again. He found his way onto the perfect tiny little patch of earth where he could watch the eclipse AND see the International Space Station transit across the sun during the eclipse. The math is bonkers. He got a bit lucky because they periodically adjust the height of the space station (it slowly falls to earth) and the last adjustment put the viewing location on some reservation land that is very difficult to get to. It all worked out and he has a great video about it. He wins the eclipse.
I first learned about OBDII back in 2003. It’s the on board diagnostics system in your car that lets you get all kinds of live data while your car is running. I bought all the electronics to make my own reader and then… nothing. Eventually in 2008 I realized that I was never going to build it and bought a ScanGauge. I happily used that little device in my Subaru and later in my F150. It worked flawlessly, but now it’s sitting in the garage because I got an upgrade.
Indiana Trip
Our summer vacations were dedicated to family this year. At the end of July, we went to a family reunion in Fort Peck, MT and then a couple weeks ago we flew out to Indiana. We had originally planned to go earlier in the year, but we ended up moving the trip as it was the same week that Tyla’s mom passed away. Thankfully Southwest has an incredible flight change policy!
We were in Indiana for 8 nights, and, as usual, we had a great time. It was so relaxing to just hang out with very few responsibilities. Luke, Rachel and David came for the weekend so that added some extra fun. Grandpa and Lynnette came down for the day too so Grandpa and I could celebrate our birthday together. We didn’t do anything huge but we had a bunch of good day trips including a botanical center, lots of tractor rides, putt putt golf, go karts, the Studebaker Museum and a water ski show.
Thanks again to Dad and Mom for hosting us and spending so much time playing with Elijah!